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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.